Movie fans call the shots

Tim Robey reports on the birth of a new film phenomenon - the amateur cut

By Tim Robey

12:01AM GMT 26 Jan 2002

HANDS up if you hated the floppy-eared, pratfalling, computer-generated sidekick Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace. That's everyone, right? But one particularly resourceful fan in America actually decided to do something about it.

Mike J Nichols, a freelance film editor based in California, was so disappointed with George Lucas's film that he produced his own version of it last year, by re-cutting the official one with computer editing software. He handed it around to friends, and soon copies were being distributed via the internet.

This unauthorised cut, known as The Phantom Edit, has caused a great stir in cyberspace by fixing many of the problems that disgruntled fans had experienced with the movie. Just one of several similar re-edits of The Phantom Menace by amateurs, it has been hailed by many as a significant improvement on Lucas's original.

It's a sign - and there are many other signs - that our days as a more or less captive audience at the movies may be coming to an end. On the big screen, the film-makers still have final cut, and, for the time being, the final say, but all those who own even something as basic as a DVD player are, to some extent, calling the shots themselves - skipping scenes, looking at them from different camera angles, and viewing additional footage that didn't make it into the original cut.

Lucas's introduction in the scrolling prologue at the beginning of The Phantom Menace has been replaced by a manifesto from Nichols: "Being someone of the 'George Lucas generation', I have re-edited a standard VHS version of The Phantom Menace into what I believe is a much stronger film by relieving the viewer of as much story redundancy, Anakin action and dialogue, and Jar Jar Binks as possible."

Binks - as reviled a figure in internet chat forums as Osama bin Laden - does indeed have a drastically reduced role in this re-edit, which runs a full 20 minutes shorter than Lucas's version.

The Phantom Editor, who for a long while refused to give out his name, and was briefly rumoured to be the cult indie director Kevin Smith, expanded on his intentions in a web interview.

"The concept of The Phantom Edit began soon after the release of The Phantom Menace. Like most people, I really wanted to like it; I just couldn't get to that place. There are things about The Phantom Menace that are bad on paper. There are not so great performances that are permanently burned on to the negative. There is Jar Jar Binks.

"So, unlike the rest of the people who simply wrote off Lucas and retreated to some internet chat room to talk about how they could've done better, I decided to challenge myself by making The Phantom Menace into something that, had it been released as the theatrical version, would not have alienated as many people."

When the existence of The Phantom Edit came to the attention of George Lucas, he didn't initially have a problem with it, as one fan's creative (if critical) response to the movie. But when significant numbers of copies started being sold over the net, the issue became one of copyright infringement, and Lucasfilm's lawyers stepped in. Nichols apologised and distanced himself from those distributing bootleg copies, which he said had never been his intention.

As the Napster debate has shown, this is the sort of legal quagmire the internet almost inevitably gives rise to, by providing such easy access to intellectual property. The web is not yet an effective means for the direct distribution of feature-length films since the files are enormous to download, unlike a three-minute music track. But as connection speeds get ever faster, it will become more difficult for Hollywood to prevent widespread piracy along these lines. It could also mean more phantom editors crawling out of the woodwork - and offering serious competition to the studio-endorsed version of a film.

Currently, all that can be done on these viewers' cuts is to delete existing footage. But the digital video revolution - spearheaded by Lucas himself, whose upcoming Episode Two has been digitally shot in its entirety - could change that. It's cheaper and easier than ever before to shoot your own scenes and manipulate them using a computer program such as Final Cut Pro or iMovie, an editing application now routinely bundled with Apple Macs. Nichols himself faked a few shots and inserted them into The Phantom Edit, as well as altering subtitled dialogue and taking advantage of Final Cut's many other facilities for playing around with existing footage.

In the living room, DVD technology doesn't yet offer anything like these possibilities, but it is a medium with major potential benefits for fans and film-makers alike.

As well as being the obvious place for directors' cuts in future, it can also satisfy our curiosity about unused footage that would otherwise languish on the cutting room floor. The disc for Ridley Scott's Alien, for example, contains a series of separately accessed deleted scenes, including a much-discussed sequence in which Sigourney Weaver's Ripley discovers two fellow crew members trapped in cocoons.

What remains to be seen is how much customising DVDs will ultimately allow us to do. It's not beyond the capabilities of the format to let us choose which scenes to include and which to leave out, in effect constructing our own cut of the movie. By inserting Alien's cocoon sequence in its rightful place near the climax, we could decide for ourselves whether Scott was right to excise it on grounds of pacing.

In a development along these lines, three companies in Utah have been working on devices that will give consumers access to what amounts to DIY home video censorship. The idea is that Bible-belt America might prefer to watch Saving Private Ryan with reduced carnage, The Matrix with fewer apocalyptic shoot-outs, or Titanic minus a nude Kate Winslet. This equipment will let parents remove or tone down the offending scenes before showing the films on DVD to their children.

It's exactly the sort of innovation that might have more universal applications for fans who want to create their own ideal edit of films they know and love. Consider Apocalypse Now Redux, the extended version of Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam epic. If this is the cut for posterity, many would appreciate the option of watching it without the widely disliked 20-minute plantation sequence, but with most of the other restored footage in place.

Until this option is open to us, those with the technological know-how will continue to reconfigure films in their own way - legal or otherwise. Recordable DVD players are now arriving on the market, and hackers are managing to circumvent the encryption that theoretically prevents you copying material from one disc to another. The recently released Phantom Menace DVD contains seven deleted scenes, bits of which will no doubt make their way into further unauthorised cuts before too long. And as for the original Phantom Editor, there's at least one film from last year he's itching to get his hands on. Who knows? At half the length and with a quarter of the eye-gazing, Pearl Harbor could well be a masterpiece.